TypeScript 3.0 is finally released with ‘improved errors’, editor productivity and more

It’s finally here! Microsoft just released the latest version of their favorite web development language almost 2 years after TypeScript 2.0 was announced. TypeScript 3.0 comes with plenty of new features and a few breaking changes.

The release candidate for 3.0 which was released a few weeks before introduced some new features such as project reference functionality, extracting and spreading parameter lists using tuples, and support for the JSX defaultProps. This final release brought in some new features which makes this new version much more exciting, especially when we consider the changes brought in to improve the developer experience.

Improved errors and UX

When you see ‘improved errors’ in a feature set, you might think, “Okay, so even now we get errors, but in a better way”. But that is not exactly what the TypeScript team meant. Improving the error messages had been one of the biggest agenda for this release and the TypeScript team has not let us down by introducing related error spans and improved messages and collaboration.

Related error spans and elaborated error messages

An error can occur due to multiple reasons. One of those reasons and a pretty important one is error coming from different parts of the code. Related error spans are a new way to surface that information to users. In TypeScript 3.0, error messages can provide messages on other locations so that users can reason about cause-and-effect of an error.

Since TypeScript 2.9, the team at Microsoft has been investing more resources on how to provide better and accurate error messages, which would lead to faster resolution time. By taking a core set of cases that give a smarter, cleaner, and more accurate error experience.

Editor Productivity

Writing code with TypeScript has always been a pleasant experience since the language leverages its syntactic and semantic knowledge, which allows one to write code more easily. Editors like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and others with a TypeScript plugin to provide things users love like code completion, Go to Definition, and even quick fixes and refactorings.

Building on this same trend, TypeScript 3.0 brings in new features like Named import refactorings, productivity features around JSX like providing completions for JSX closing tags, and Quick fixes for unreachable code and unused labels.

Over the last few years, TypeScript has been slowly creeping into more and more web development projects with a clear advantage over JavaScript. Big time frameworks like Angular, React, and now Vue.js have started providing support for this next generation programming language. With this new release, TypeScript looks all set for total domination on the web frontier. For more information on the final TypeScript 3.0 release, check out the official Microsoft Blog.